by Priyanka Bhardwaj
- India -
Education remains an emotional subject in a poor and developing country like India, where it is seen as the primary means for social and economic mobility. Indian families are known to sell land and spend their life’s savings to educate their children, especially males. Such desperation means that any change in the sector is a highly debated subject.
by Shreyasi Singh
- India -
Sometimes, just asking for a small cup of milk to brew your tea can bring domestic violence to a halt. Sounds too simple a solution? Well, it need not be as a recent public awareness campaign in India has proven.
The Bell Bajao (Ring the Bell) campaign urges men to take a stand against domestic violence. The comprehensive campaign, launched in August 2008 with TV and radio spots, print ads, mobile video vans and an online campaign, is aimed at building conversation around domestic violence in India, critical for an issue that has grown with society’s tacit acceptance and uneasy silences.
by Emily Rose Herzlin
- USA -
Katie’s eyes twinkle mischievously from across the classroom, sparkling from behind her red hair falling over her face. I wave at her, and her gaze never totally meets mine. She raises her hand and gestures back to me briefly, not sure whether I am a friend. Just as quickly, her attention goes elsewhere, back to her work.
Eleven-and-a-half year old Katie attends a rigorous school where the students are pushed harder than most of us have ever been pushed in our lives. Her curriculum consists of learning how to identify familiar people, make a snack, sort laundry, and rollerblade. Katie has autism, and is one of just a handful of girls at the school she attends that specializes in the disorder. The student body consists of just under thirty students, only four of whom are girls.
by Katharine Daniels
Executive Editor, The WIP
- USA -
As many as a third of California’s teachers may retire over the next decade leaving California with a shortage of approximately 100,000 teachers. While budget cuts limiting opportunities for new teachers are compelling enough reasons to choose different professions, it is well understood by most prospective teachers that teaching, while honorable and at times rewarding, is a stressful, unappreciated, and undervalued career choice.
by Kimberly N. Chase
- USA -
In an age of ever-busier schedules, escalating costs and dwindling funding for public education, the image of the full-time college student, loafing in libraries and flipping through volumes of political theory in campus cafés, is less a plan than a distant dream for many of California’s young people. Lucky young intellectuals can still be spotted in droves on the Berkeley and Stanford campuses, sporting fashionable clothes or long, flowing hair and modern hippie attire, but most of the state’s less privileged will never live those idyllic four years of limbo between adolescence and adult life.
That’s because many young people are thrown into the water before they learn to swim. It might be easier to look the other way, but it’s our responsibility as a state to make sure that they have a chance to make their way to a satisfying life.
by Katharine Daniels
Executive Editor, The WIP
- USA -
It’s clear that school budgets are woefully inadequate and underfunded. But, will simply throwing money at a system that is flawed, broken, and unequal successfully nurture the academic achievement of under-performing students? The great state of California has the third highest student teacher ratio in the country and the dubious distinction of coming in dead last in total school staff - principals, teachers, guidance counselors, and librarians. Lack of adequate resources is exacerbated by grave inequalities in many school districts throughout the state. Often under-performing schools suffer from a lack of qualified teachers, textbooks, access to a curriculum that prepares students for college, and safe school environments.
by Sumukha S. Ravishankar
- USA/India -
In Indian society, where everyone aspires to be perfect in all matters, learning disabilities are not discussed, even within families. Where it is socially acceptable and even encouraged to blatantly compare and contrast children’s achievements among parents, social life is very stressful for those who have children with disabilities. Traditionally, individuals with learning disabilities are labeled as dumb, imperfect or inferior. They are typically marginalized, not only by the members of the larger society, but also within their own homes.
After struggling within the social and educational systems in India, my husband and I made the difficult decision to move to the US to provide our daughter with the education that our country could not.
by Pushpa Iyer
- USA -
It was close to 8pm on a Saturday two months ago. I was walking down a big, busy street in Phnom Penh, Cambodia with a colleague, returning to our hotel after having dinner. As we passed a poor section of the city, I felt a slight movement behind me. When I turned my head, someone put their hands around my neck, strangling and almost choking me. In those few moments, the only thought in my head was: someone’s trying to kill me! Seconds later when I screamed, I felt a tug at the gold chain around my neck as my assailant let go. I was being robbed! The realization was a relief, and more so when I found my chain in the collar of my shirt - broken but still there.
by Janelle Weiner
- USA -
As school districts across the United States brace for midyear budget cuts, nervous teachers are whispering about the layoffs that could follow. In this bleak economic climate, where one state’s proposal calls for eliminating $10.6 billion in education spending, teachers are hesitant to ask administrators for classroom extras or even necessities.
Teachers often reach into their own wallets to bridge the gap.
by Zakeer Fehmida
- India -
Not long ago, a young man named Srinivas and his friends had just planted saplings along one of Chennai's busy thoroughfares and stood wondering how they could ensure the plants' survival amidst the sidewalk bustle. A nearby bicycle shop owner offered discarded bicycle tubes and suggested converting them into plant barriers. The tubes were piled together and the saplings got a new lease on life. Their efforts were part of their work with Diya, a social welfare organization that Srinivas and a group of his fellow IT professionals formed in response to their desire to help provide a platform for citizens to come forward and participate in resolving issues of public interest. Srinivas is one of Diya’s co-founders and says of his organization’s objectives, “We keep looking for ways to step out and make a genuine difference to our society, whether that means a slum development initiative, or a tree planting drive, or lending a helping hand to a blind school.”
by Mridu Khullar
- India -
Couples in India are finally figuring out that hours of horoscope-matching sessions followed by measures to correct planetary positions make not a good marriage. Urban educated twenty-somethings of today are ditching the priest's grass mat and heading to the counselor's leather couch.
Pre-marital counseling, a concept that has so far been alien to Indians, is making an entry into the psyche of the young middle-class. Counseling of any sort has traditionally been seen as a "western idea," and something that is not part of the Indian culture. Formal and professional pre-marital counseling is looked upon even more skeptically by a generation of parents who met each other no more than once or twice before their own arranged marriages.
by Halimah Abdallah Kisule
- Uganda -
Ms Akullo Flavia, a retail shop owner in a Kampala suburb, stands puzzled in the local market not knowing what to buy for supper. Her initial plan to buy fresh fish is ruined - there is no fish for sale at the stalls. A local hajati, or fish dealer, is disappointed too. She explains that the moon’s recent brightness is helping the big fish to see the net and escape. The little fish that get trapped in the nets are all sold on the beaches at much higher prices to the waiting refrigerator trucks of fish processing companies who export to countries like China and several parts of Europe. Officials from the fisheries department say that even these companies are facing a deficit and only exporting a third of their capacity due to declining fish populations in the lakes and rivers.
by Zubeida Mustafa
- Pakistan -
Anil is now a young man of 19, studying for his high school examinations at Bahria College. He is also working a summer job with a cell phone company to earn a few extra rupees for his family.
Coming from a poor family – his father works as a part-time cleaner – Anil’s chances of improving his life were indeed bleak until his mother sent him to Shabina. In a country that spends barely two percent of its GDP on education, Pakistan has only scarce resources to provide a decent education to 60 million or so children under 15; not all can hope to be educated. According to Pakistan’s 2007-2008 Economic Survey, only 57 percent of children (age 10 years and above) are enrolled in school.
by Cathy Oerter
- USA -
I ran through the Iowa countryside, young and carefree, unaware of the life I had been richly blessed with. It was just me and the breeze and the green methodical cornfields. The gravel roads, loose with sand and oversized rocks, could easily sprain an ankle yet were gladly accepted in lieu of a track that did not exist. Small towns in Iowa could not afford that luxury and I knew I wanted to run. The gravel became my path into another world.
Al was tall and muscular and boyishly handsome; he was a gentle giant. No loud bravado, just a common man who had unusually large muscles and monstrous hands that made mine disappear completely in their grasp.
by Carrie R. Sparrevohn
- USA -
In 2005 I traveled to Uganda, East Africa, for the first time. I met Margaret Nangobi on that trip, in Mwanyangiri, a tiny village about an hour’s drive from the capitol. What transpired between us broke my privileged self in pieces and I became the receiver one hundred fold of what I was to give.
For every mother that dies in the US of pregnancy, Uganda loses 50. Around the world, each minute, we lose one mother as a direct result of her pregnancy. Improving women’s access to experienced care providers, antibiotics and medication to prevent or stop hemorrhaging would prevent over half of these deaths.
As I prepared to spend November 2005 in Uganda, a wonderful friend and mentor, Jan McNabb, began to tell her friends what I was planning to do. People began handing her money for the needy in Uganda. As a result, the Sally Clinic Project of With Woman was born.
by Anna Clark
- USA -
Who talks about prisoners these days? Certainly not the US presidential candidates or most others up for election in 2008, unless it’s in tangential “get tough on crime” rhetoric. In the media, quality coverage such as Jeff Gerritt’s Pulitzer-nominated series on medical care in Michigan prisons, which appeared last year in The Detroit Free Press, is overshadowed by courtroom dramas and legal thrillers. MSNBC has built something of a franchise in its “To Catch a Predator” series, which lures people to a Dateline set, humiliates them by reading their chat room transcripts with someone they thought was underage, and then calls on a police crew to rather unnecessarily tackle them in an arrest sequence right out of a summer blockbuster.
Authentic communication from and about prisoners exists, but it’s relegated to a niche market outside of most print and online news sources, of influential political blogs, of the catalogues of big publishers, and of the speeches of election year candidates. Presumably, its minimal share of attention is justified because decision makers think their audiences don’t care much about prisons and the people in them.
by Ellen Snortland
- USA -
Let me introduce you to my friend John Stoltenberg, a warm and generous American man full of good will and humor, who is also one of the United States’ leading male feminists, widely respected as a thoughtful activist, scholar, author, and magazine editor, all at once. He holds degrees in divinity and fine arts.
He was the husband of Andrea Dworkin, the noted radical American feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she believed was linked with rape and other forms of violence against women. Andrea died prematurely at 58 in April 2005.
by Ellen Snortland
- USA -
Midnight. Intensely urban downtown neighborhood in Los Angeles where the alleys reek of urine and garbage. Dark Craftsman house in the Carpenter-Gothic style. My home. I cross the threshold and meet an interrupted burglar who raises his knife, ready to plunge it into my throat or heart. My scream is so intense he drops his knife, grabs his ears and runs like hell. “Thank you, mister,” I neglect to yell, because I was yet to know the impact this event would have on the balance of my life.
by Rose-Anne Clermont
- Germany -
Before we had our own children, my husband and I began sponsoring a child in Senegal named Absa, a pretty little girl with clever eyes.
It has been seven years and our children know the pictures of Absa, standing behind a large wooden bowl and holding onto a tall wooden mortar.
Recently, we received a check-list with a blank space next to school attendance. My eyes rested on the latest picture of Absa, now almost a woman, and I wondered what would become of her?
I called the aid organization and asked why Absa was no longer in school. The woman on the other end of the telephone line sighed.
by Constance Manika
- Zimbabwe -
“The stories we listened to made us bleed inside, the genital wounds we later had to help nurse evoked us, the long distances we traveled every day and night to educate girls on their rights made us strong, the songs of joy and sorrow the girls sang made us more passionate, everything to do with girlhood and the fact that we were there for the girls pushed us to do even more and more from the heart, soul, mind and all. The fact that we finally claimed the girls' spaces where the girls now live and develop free of violence makes it imperative that we share these great tidings” - GCN Director and Founder Betty MakoniI first met Zimbabwean child rights activist Betty Makoni in 2005 at a discussion forum organized by the Southern Africa Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS). The topic of discussion was how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) involved in children's work could best coordinate and complement each other in the fight against child sexual abuse.
When I first heard Betty speak back then, I immediately fell in love with her. This woman spoke with so much passion and emotion about the issue of rape and abuse of young girls. She was equally disturbed by girls’ general lack of opportunities in life when compared with those given to boys.
by Michelle Chen
- USA -
The odds were against this school from its inception, as it confronted a constant stream of political smear, media scrutiny and political tensions, which continues to this day. Still, while foment around the school and its ties to Arab culture and language attest to the complexities of our time, its premise–building awareness through education–is resoundingly simple.
As the author of this article–back when the drama was still unfolding—I chose to end the piece with some prescient words from the student Adnane Rhoulam. In a narrative that centers on the use and distortion of language in the public sphere, a child’s voice can be a very powerful thing.
The recent New York Times article focused on key players in the political wrangling over the school. We believe the WIP’s coverage of this issue complements the Times’ investigation by highlighting the voices from the communities involved–students, grassroots groups pushing for multicultural education in the city, and the youth activists who, in an effort to bring visibility to Arab community issues, found themselves swept up in a political firestorm.
by Courtney E. Martin
USA
You might guess that this subject was a perfect stranger, someone I was intimidated by or nervous about getting to know. Instead, she was my best friend.
Don’t get me wrong. Reporting and writing my recently released book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body did involve speaking with a lot of strangers. I interviewed over 100 girls and women between the ages of 9 and 19, as well as dozens of experts, including psychologists, nutritionists, medical doctors, and media critics. Nonetheless, I was convinced that to tell the real story of contemporary girls and their bodies, I would also need to sit down with my nearest and dearest—many of whom were my inspiration for writing the book in the first place.
by Imelda V. Abaño & Esther Nakkazi
Philippines/Uganda
Reporting from Sydney, Australia
One of the greatest public health failures in the fight against AIDS is the world’s inability to prevent widespread HIV infection among Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), according to officials from the Foundation for Aids Research (amFAR). MSM is the most prominent method of HIV transmission in nearly all Latin American countries, as well as the US, Canada and some Western Europe countries. The roots of this public health failure are denial, discrimination and criminalization.
by Imelda V. Abaño
Philippines
Yet according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), only 16 percent of mothers in the Philippines breast-feed their children, an extraordinarily low rate for such a poor country.
by Delphine Zulu
- Zambia -
Because this problem continues to plague Zambia’s children and in addition accelerates the spread of AIDS, Zambia’s High Court judges have urgently called for the amendment of the Defilement Act: the hope is that publicly parading and photographing the offenders will deter them, where prison sentences have not.
At every court in Zambia, whether in lower or higher courts, at least three to four defilement cases are now being handled per session, compared to recent years past, when defilement cases only came before the courts about once every three months.
by Juliette Terzieff
USA
By Suad Hamada
Bahrain
A young girl has faced the threat of being expelled from her primary school only because her mother is infected with AIDS.
This secret was neither known to the girl nor the school, but was exposed by a parent who insisted on suspending her to protect other children from infection. Despite the mother’s adamant protestations that her daughter was not infected with the virus, the school persisted until a blood test was performed on the girl. The test revealed what the mother passionately claimed from the beginning - her daughter is HIV negative.
The girl’s story is but one account of the many injustices suffered by youngsters with infected parents and those children who have HIV/AIDS.
by Pilirani Semu-Banda
Malawi
The on-going adoption process of a one-year old Malawian orphan, David Banda, by Pop Star Madonna has highlighted the plight of orphans in Malawi.
A million children are orphaned in Malawi, of which half were AIDS-related illnesses affecting one or both parents, most of whom are cared for by relatives who are already experiencing severe economic hardship. About 8 million of Malawi’s 12 million people live below the national poverty line of $1-a-day. Child-headed households are becoming increasingly common, where many households have been discovered to be run by children as young as 12 years old.
One of the orphanages benefiting from Madonna’s financial assistance is the Consol Homes in Malawi’s Central region. When Madonna visited this orphanage with David on Thursday, April 19, she urged the multitude of orphans and the poor who gathered to see her to help themselves.
"This is a partnership, it's not only for me to do everything, but we need to work together and you have to help yourselves," Madonna said.
But the orphans have already been doing what Madonna is urging them to do.
by Pilirani Semu-Banda
Malawi
In recent months, Malawi’s president, Bingu wa Mutharika, has embarked on a series of whistle-stop tours during week days. Consequently, female teachers feel compelled to dance for him for fear of reprisals from authorities. In Malawi there is a lot of hero-worshipping for politicians, which started during the 30-year dictatorial rule from 1964 to 1994.
Malawians, especially women, sing and dance to songs in praise of politicians they support and conversely castigate those they do not. The president, however, uses civil servants for these demonstrations, including teachers.
A spokesperson for the country’s most influential opposition party, Sam Mpasu, describes this tendency by the president as detrimental to the country’s education standards, which are already grim.
Malawi’s education standards started declining as soon as the country attained democracy in 1994 and abolished school fees for primary education; this resulted in an increase in enrollment from 1.9 million pupils to 3.2 million.
by Janelle Weiner
- USA -
Johnny realized late in his high school career he needed to make a change or face the fate of not graduating with his class. After cutting school regularly his first two years, he decided he didn’t want to struggle like his mother and father, both of whom never graduated.
Once he made that decision, his behavior changed.
“I started coming to school a lot and not getting into fights,” he said. “Stayed away from the bad behavior and drugs.” Johnny’s turnaround is exactly what every teacher and administrator in the Sacramento public school Johnny attends wants to see.
However, Johnny has a major hurdle remaining: the California High School Exit Exam. (CAHSEE). He has failed it four times.
